>DJT made a better pitch

The issue I have with is that a lot of the sales pitch was a bald-faced lie that anyone with a grade-school education and life experience should have seen through. For example, a president does not have a "grocery price" knob in the oval office that he can just turn down on day one. Even if you interpret it generously as "will start implementing policies that will bring down consumer prices," none of that was detailed. In fact, the main talking point about tariffs would obviously have the opposite effect. Anyone with any clue would see tariffs as taxes on the American public, but he kept saying "other countries" pay the tariffs, another bald-faced lie. The guy can't go 2 complete sentences (if he actually manages to form them) without tossing in a lie.

Bring it back to /. appropriate analogy: If Intel colluded with PC publications and "influencers" to publish false benchmarks that show it to be better than AMD, and this lead to strong initial sales of a new processor compared to AMD's offering, does that really indicate that that's what consumers wanted? Is it fair to point to those sales numbers to say "see, Intel is more popular, it must be because it's better!" Is the correct solution to also have AMD lie so it's "fair"?

According to polling, it appears that there is significant buyer's remorse going on. What's depressing is that we already got a "test drive" 5-8 years ago. How many of those farmers who needed a bailout last time thought, "hey, we need more of that!" How about those union workers who saw Trump laughing with a billionaire about firing striking workers? Did they really think, "hey, that's him looking out for the little guy!" The mind still boggles at the amount of stupidity/willful ignorance to RE-elect this guy after plenty of examples of him acting directly against the interests of large portions of the population, in addition to being malicious, ignorant, and a general creep.

I do see that the Democrats didn't have "flashy" messaging. I'm not sure what they could have done against "flooding the zone" of BS. Politics, when done correctly, is (supposed to be) boring, and what we had at the end of Biden's term was boring in a good way.

I tossed this out on /. like over a decade (or two) ago. I think the responses I got were either that it's impractical somehow or that it already existed. It's too far back to find, but would it be possible to create a camera with a private key in silicon that signs every image it creates. Any attempt to read out the key from the silicon would destroy it.

The image can only be read with a public key for that specific camera, and the encryption would be embedded in the image (watermark) in such a way that any alteration of the image will destroy the encryption. I'm no an encryption guy by any means so I'm not even sure what the correct terms are. In any case, is there a way to make something like this? At least for special cameras used by police/investigators, can this be done such that it is certain that the image is unaltered after it came from a specific camera.

I also wanted full control and couldn't stand sharing anything with a third party willy nilly. Even a Pi Zero W can run motion. It will also locally store photos/videos based on detection criteria you set, so WiFi jamming isn't an issue. Pi Zero W is $10 (or it was at the time). I forgot how much the camera cost... probably less than $20. (It came with IR LEDs). SD cards are also cheap.

But I'll still take it easy and not let the sound of my own wheels drive me crazy.

That would net them 2.5 cents per transaction on average. I guess I could see that level of greed/pettiness on the part of corporate entities in this day and age, but such a small benefit would probably be drowned out by the effect of not being able to advertise a price, say, 1 cent less than their competitor. They won't get that 2.5 cents if the customer decides to go somewhere else. That, in addition to any customers who have a choice being disgusted/repelled by such pettiness and choosing someplace else to go.

I would hope any store will set up a fair rounding policy (up/down to nearest nickel, round even on exact 0.5).

There are plenty of "retroclones" out there, like OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, Basic Fantasy, Dark Dungeons, etc. are just re-implementations of the various OD&D, 1st/2nd edition, Rules Cyclopedia, etc. rulesets, all downloadable.

I'm not aware of the newer stuff (3rd ed or newer, I guess they are not 'retro' enough.), but the older stuff is good enough to get the framework for interesting play.
There's also Dungeon Slayers, whose basic rules are downloadable.

In that case, though, that would be poor test prep because a good chunk of the AP test score is (was?) the speaking portion. I recall having to record several short answers and a long answer into a tape recorder. Did they get rid of that part?

I didn't want to believe it, but one wild thought is that the robots are stopgap measure to extract the last bit of wealth out of the masses before putting them out of their misery. If they had to use workers, some of it will trickle back down (horrors!) and it would be that much harder to get the very last drop. Once that's done, they don't need the masses any more.

Looking at what they're doing in the U.S. (cutting health care, cutting food assistance, putting farmers out of business and buying up their land, encouraging vaccine skepticism, cutting back environmental protections, militarizing law enforcement to send against civilians, etc. etc.) It's exactly what you would do to "cull the herd" with mass starvation, disease, and death. In the end, they can shut down most of the robots and produce just what they need.

Not sure what they intend to do with all that wealth once it's all done, though. (and once there's no economy left, what is "wealth" anyways?) I guess they'll end up controlling the empty landscape to do as they please.

IIRC, you can set any "screen saver" as a desktop background. I was doing this in the early days of OS X until the novelty wore off. One of the screen savers will display media including photos and videos, so I think that was how you could do it then. I captured a video of a mountain stream and tried to have that as a desktop. I think it worked, but at the time, the CPU load made the machine run hot and loud all the time, so it wasn't worth it.

More interesting was the Marine Aquarium screen saver. Not video, but not too bad/distracting and viable as such.

I guess if by "good thing", you mean that letting life-threatening falsehoods proliferate among the gullible will sort of help clean the gene pool is a good thing, then I guess that's sort of true if you are cynical enough. I feel a little bad for "innocent" (other than being stupid) people to die/get injured by listening to misinformation, though, so I do think it's not all good in some instances. Even for people who are not generally terminally stupid, there are gaps in knowledge that may make them vulnerable to misinformation. Who knows, when I'm older and have fewer of my marbles left, I may get caught up in one. Also, for information involving communicable diseases, actions of the stupid have consequences for the non-stupid, so there is significant public interest in trying to limit the damage therefrom. This seems to remove the safeguards put in place to do that. I would consider that other than a good thing.

The scale between the classic "'fire!' in crowded theater" and inconsequential personal opinion is not quite black and white. Different folks don't quite agree whether these statements belong in the former bin or the latter. For folks who put some of this information in the former bin, removing these safeguards would be a bad thing. I would venture to guess that at least some of the folks who were blocked were in the former bin, and giving them back their platform is a negative. Some of them might have been in the latter bin, and that would be a positive. Like many things, it's probably a mix, and I think that's how it's "other than a good thing".

I thought the risk is more like some superpower version of a prion disease. If the opposite chirality organisms produced something induced opposite chirality molecules that caused our molecules to assemble in some nasty/useless way. Or perhaps an opposite amino acid is similar enough to get wedged into a regular protein but enough to throw a wrench in the works.

I think the point is that there are many facets to the problem and we just don't know, and the possible consequences are great enough that researchers should proceed with caution.

"Hey, the first one's free, kid."
"Just say 'No'!"

My opinion is that this is stupid. People who comprise corporations already have a voice as individuals. They can always take money out of their own pockets to support the causes they want to support. If they want, just have the corporation pay them additional salary/fees that they can then donate. Allowing corporations to donate money gives those who control corporations influence above and beyond their influence as individuals. In effect, they get to leverage the resources of all of the shareholders and employees to THEIR cause, whether or not all of the shareholders/employees support it. Not all shareholders have direct control of their holdings, and employees are often at a power disadvantage in terms of choice of employment, so a system that allows some people to influence politics using corporate resources does not sit right with me. Not allowing corporate persons additional speech rights does not diminish anyone's individual rights, but it does keep some people from having more rights than others.

Regardless of the reasoning, the observed reality is that majority of people are quite unhappy with a government that seems to be serving $BIGCORPS to the exclusion of the general populace, and that does not seem like a good formula for continued peace and prosperity. If the intent of the Supreme Court is to serve the People, they should overturn it.

Not just that, but RFK is directly responsible for bunch of children dying needlessly in Samoa. The blood is figuratively directly on his hands. Now he's trying to do that to children in the US. The one good thing he's promoting does not excuse the bazillion horrible things he's doing, especially since the dismantling of the regulatory apparatus by the administration [gutting of the DoA, FDA, etc.] would take the teeth out of any positive food health initiatives RFK might be promoting. I can unequivocally say that RFK IS the enemy of the American people. The misinformation and policies he's promoting will be a huge net negative for the populace.

I also wonder if this has any relation to comedic timing, how a certain amount of pause or phrase delivery can enhance or diminish the joke, and when things "hit" the audience.